How to remove pixely textures

[Da5id Weatherwax]

5 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

It's also worth noting that texture bake with overlapped UVs may generate artifacts ie a base mirrored object with some asymmetrical additions, but it can happen on perfectly symmetrical objects too. 

Moreover, it increases bake time, as the single UV shells would undergo their own sampling for the bake to happen (the same area would show as baking twice) 

Also, normal maps baked from high to low poly would generate inconsistent tangent space oriented normals, as the mirrored UVs have their normals flipped, possibly resulting in one side looking like normal map inverted. 

Better moving the mirrored UVs to another UV tile to avoid such occurrences

Unless the bake happens before the mirror modifier is applied and "made real". Then, only the island for the "real" part, not the overlapping one for the other half generated by the modifier, actually exists and is the only one baked. That's why, in my post, I said " unwrap and texture it before "applying" "

With normals you definitely have a point. My personal rule of thumb is that if all baking can be completed successfully before applying the mirror modifier and actually creating the duped verts, the overlapped islands will usually be ok. If I have to do any baking after generating the overlapping islands then I may as well leave it all until then because I will need to separate the islands anyway.

[OptimoMaximo]

19 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

Unless the bake happens before the mirror modifier is applied and "made real".

This is a concept strictly related to softwares that have the modifier approach AND don't treat the modifier as real geometry. Meaning you're seeing it under a solely Blender-centric perspective. While it is the case of the OP, other readers that don't use Blender might need a more app-agnostic explanation or workflow idea. 

19 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

If I have to do any baking after generating the overlapping islands(...)I will need to separate the islands anyway.

This is exactly the point for moving the UV shells/islands to another UV tile: if you move them to the relative same location where those were generated, you can keep the benefit of overlapped UVs and the normal map baking (the one more severely affected by overlapping, AO's are easier to manage) would work just fine, as the tangent orientations would be compensated by the geometry orientation, removing the chance of overlapped baking artifacts or miscalculations/wrong blending.

Edited February 27, 2020 by OptimoMaximo

[Da5id Weatherwax]

1 minute ago, OptimoMaximo said:

This is a concept strictly related to softwares that have the modifier approach AND don't treat the modifier as real geometry. Meaning you're seeing it under a solely Blender-centric perspective. While it is the case of the OP, other readers that don't use Blender might need a more app-agnostic explanation or workflow idea.

Absolutely! The OP was talking blender and that's what I use, so I was talking blender right back.

I totally missed that you were coming in with a more app-agnostic approach and you're right, I should have thought a little further outside my "blender box" - because now that I have been nudged into doing so I find myself 100% in agreement with you.